Anam

Judges' comments

André Dao has crafted a rich and invigorating novel which is deeply grounded in family memory, history, philosophy, and faith. The grandson, our narrator, battles his grandparents’ right to remember and their right to forget. At the beginning he posits an idea, which is ‘Forgetting is complicity. Remembering is complicity.’ Later in the novel we read ‘We remember to give shape to our forgetting’. It’s a profoundly personal meditation on what ‘we receive from our ancestors and what we pass on to our children’.

The story moves from 1930s Hanoi, to Paris, to Footscray and to Cambridge. As we, the reader, move across time and place, what anchors us to the story is Dao’s exquisite detail. Also locating us and the narrator in the here and now is his refreshingly honest partner Lauren and their young child Edith, as well as his work with detainees on Manus. Subverting the form of the memoir Dao has created a rich, unique and intellectually rewarding novel. At the heart of Anam is the remembrance of things, but what will remain with the reader is its rare tenderness.

The judges chose Anam for the Glenda Adams Award, from a very strong shortlist, because of its literary sophistication and Dao’s preparedness to take risks. Anam pushes the novel form in new and exciting directions. Dao trusts his reader to meet the challenges he sets, and in so doing we are richly rewarded.